@seth

Last November, Dick Costolo COO of Twitter said that they were working on a new ad product and that their ads would be great:

DC: We will have an advertising strategy. You will see that from us in the future. It will be fascinating, non-traditional, and people will love it.

MA: What’s new about it?

DC: We want to do something that’s organic, like the way it happened with Google. It will work with the tweets. People will love the ads when they see it.

MA: Talk more about the ads. Mixed in with the tweets?

DC: I didn’t say that but the message I want to send is that is that there is an advertising idea and it will come next year.

That was it.

It was a philosophical statement, not a product roadmap nor an economic model.

Yesterday on stage at the IAB I moderated a great panel with Tim Kendall of Facebook, Jed Nachman of Yelp and Anamitra Banerji.  Despite the fact that Tim has helped create a billion dollar display and CPC business at Facebook, and Jed drives a sales force that regularly sells ads at $200 CPM and higher, the only thing that people seem to want to talk about today is the speculation about when and how Twitter will be launching their new ad product.

First off, I want to apologize to Dick, Anamitra and the rest of the team at Twitter for suggesting that I knew any more than I actually do.  All I was referring to was the public statement from November and that based on that, a Twitter ad product was “imminent.”  Anamitra has a deep understanding of ad product development going back to his work at Overture and then Yahoo!  He shared a great slide at the IAB Annual Meeting about the correlation of Super Bowl game and ad - related tweets.  It is unfortunate that our casual conversation about potential Twitter ad directions has been taken out of context to become “news” when there really isn’t any.

Second, it is incredible how powerful Twitter has become as a disruptive media force.  It reminds me of the briefcase theory: how Wall Street investors in the 90s paid close attention to the size of Alan Greenspan’s briefcase as a sign of what his plans were for interest rates.

The lesson here is less about what Twitter will or won’t do in terms of advertising products.

Instead, the lesson is about recognizing the influence that Twitter already has as an advertising platform regardless of the fact that they currently offer no advertising products or generate any advertising revenue.